Virtually every consumer-facing publicly traded company now develops apps. The importance of these apps to the overall business (and the role these apps play) is very different across companies, however, which makes it difficult to provide a concise answer. For example a mobile gaming company which relies on revenue from the apps has a different goal than a consumer bank which offers apps as an extension of their core service.

At Priori Data we frequently receive inbound requests from investors who are looking to use our app download and revenue estimates as a proxy for a key metric they are tracking related to a specific company. A good recent example of this is the Pokemon Go app, which investors are tracking in connection with the Nintendo company share price.

I would classify Netflix, Twitter, Pandora, Yelp, and EA as the top-5 publicly traded companies in terms of investor inquiries with our service.

If I were to name the one public company that benefits the most from the success of Apple’s App Store though, there would be no doubt: Facebook.